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An anonymous reader writes "A Swedish professor of sociology has nominated Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Giving him the prize would also 'save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute that incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama' the prize, according to professor Stefan Svallfors. He notes ultimately that at great personal cost, 'Edward Snowden has helped to make the world a little bit better and safer.'"

How the leader of one of the most warmongering nations on Earth got awarded a Nobel Peace Prize is beyond me.

well, he promised to shutdown gitmo, bring peace to middle east, stop collateral killings when killing people branded criminals without a trial etc.. you know, change. surely he should have managed to do at least one of them...

You haven't been to an American public school lately, have you? You get a prize for showing up (even if you don't). Then another prize for competing (regardless of effort), then another prize for the winning (you didn't lose, you just got fourth place out of four). And then everyone gets some pizza and calls it a day.

Yeah. You know where you saw a lot of hunger strikes in PoW camps? In the post war Soviet Union. Of course they hadn't signed the Geneva conventions, so technically they could get away with it and weren't breaking the law. But even the Soviets would give in after a few weeks of hunger strikes, and improve prison camp conditions. Of course I am making the assumption that the prisoners of PoW camps are not "prisoners of war", because even though the US wants to portray them as "enemy combatants", they really

Then after he got elected, he found out what kind of people he had at gitmo. Probably learned all kinds of things about how the world works.

The way the world works is that you don't get to claim that you're protecting due process while you're shitting on due process, and therefore you don't get to claim that you're fighting for freedom while you're not closing Guantanamo.

Maybe Obama just figured out that your way isn't realistic even if it does play well in The Huffington Post.

Well then, we need to shut the fuck up about freedom and human rights, because we don't actually believe in them.

That wasn't an accident.The US neither invented slavery, nor was the last country to give up slavery. The US was one of the few counties to fight the global slave trade on the high seas back before it was cool.

I fear Snowden will be a martyr. Plentiful people in power don't like it when their secretive ops and motives are exposed for the world to see. The sausage of politics is ugly enough. Snowden is a modern-day Sinclair Lewis in that regard.

Obama's premature prize baffles me, save that in his own country, there are plentiful people in power that didn't want an individual outside of their control to take power. Given Obama's unfulfilled promises, they needn't have bothered in their worry.

I fear Snowden will be a martyr. Plentiful people in power don't like it when their secretive ops and motives are exposed for the world to see. The sausage of politics is ugly enough. Snowden is a modern-day Sinclair Lewis in that regard.

Obama's premature prize baffles me, save that in his own country, there are plentiful people in power that didn't want an individual outside of their control to take power. Given Obama's unfulfilled promises, they needn't have bothered in their worry.

I"m surprised to see that you think that Obama was ever out of someones control. His meteoric rise to political power was so fast that I find it hard to believe he doesn't have some very rich and powerful people calling most of his shots. Did anyone really know his name prior to the 2004 Democratic Convention? I certainly had not really heard his name until the 2008 Democratic Primary began.

In any event, I don't see how anyone can become a politician at that level in this country without being corrupt. Which is why we need to fix the system.

To be fair, a good majority of presidential candidates go unknown by the general public until they run for that office. Of course there are exceptions, such as Hilary Clinton, because she was the First Lady (she is a lady, right?) or they're involved in some major news headlines. But seriously, how many of our current 535 Congressman (assuming all the posts are currently filled, I haven't checked) or 50 state governors can you name? Especially ones that don't represent you? And those are just the two major pools presidential candidates come from, but they could come from many other places. So it should be no surprise that you've never heard of someone if they haven't given you a reason to.

Obama replaced Ryan, an Illinois senatorial scumbag. Illinois is a hotbed of political chicanery.

I can recall probably 120 reps, half the senate and each and every president and VP. My faculties are different than most Americans. I voted for Obama in both presidential elections based on hope, the hope that there might be some political change away from the corruption we now face in the US. I wanted to see the vacuous wars stanched to all parties satisfaction. I hoped for regulation that was gleefully stanched during the Bush and Clinton administrations. I wanted to see people come together, not be compartmentalized and marginalized. Didn't happen. We're barely holding it together, but it's been both been better and worse during my long life.

All the altrusitic things I was taught in grade school and high school civics classes have been stanched by the motives of greed and fear. Once in a long while, common sense takes hold, but only for brief moments. Then something else happens. I fear for my grandchildren.

I mean, I don't know what to say. You fear for your grand chidren? Once in a long while "common sense takes hold?" You voted for Obama, wait for it... twice. Did you just not bother doing any research? His terribleness wasn't being thrown at you in the MSM, so you didn't bother to use your common sense (must not have had a very good grip in November)? Obama is not fundamentally different since this time one year ago.

I'm not saying you should have voted for Romney, and before anyone says it, you were the one who threw your vote away, not us 3rd party voters.

It may weaken an unfair advantage the western world had in international diplomacy through spying on foreign governments - something they shouldn't have had anyway IMO. Spying on foreign governments should only be done in war for strategic purposes. Saying that we have to be bad because the other guys are being bad is just rationalizing an awful race to the bottom. I'd say it's good that the leaks have shown that the western world is becoming more like the genuine authoritarian regimes and offer some chance of correcting it.

Arafat got the peace prize jointly with Peres and Rabin, specifically for entering into negotiations for peace (at Oslo IIRC) despite severe opposition from their own constituents. For each of them, maintaining a warlike stance would have been the easier political choice. In that light, the Prize was actually awarded to someone worthy for a change, even if very little came of it in the end.

To the extent that Snowden exposed the overreach of widespread data collection and surveillance of US citizens without probable cause, he may well be a hero.

If he truly has information that could badly damage legitimate U.S. interests (something the Guardian reporter claims, which I think may be overblown), and if he is willing to share that directly (or even indirectly) with foreign governments specifically to inflict that damage, then I have a problem with that.

There is a wide range of legitimate points of view about U.S. foreign policy, legitimacy of various techniques to protect national security, and so on. I respect many people's differing opinions on this. One thing I do think has been helpful is that the current debates have broken across once impenetrable ideological boundaries; people usually on opposite sides of the political divide are finding themselves agreeing with each other. It's forcing people on all sides to focus on the facts and issues rather than cling to ideology. That can't be bad.

The Nobel Peace Prize and scientific Nobel prizes are decided on by completely different groups. The only thing they have in common is the word "Nobel". The scientific prizes are decided by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Peace prize is decided by an independent body, the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Because this isn't hasty orill-conceived. This does prove, however, that the Nobel Peace Prize is designed to be awarded to whomever is popular in the news currently before the public forgets them and moves on to the next disaster. Who is next for the Nobel PP? Trayvon Martin? Or is that story already run its course since the trial is over?

Actually be responsible for bringing peace to the world? Barack Obama didn't do anything to promote peace when he first took office, and Snowden hasn't done anything "yet" to promote peace either. Nothing saying that what he did might not later, but should we not at least wait to see how the drama unfolds first before we award the medal?

Someone should give Obama the "best arming of rebels" award now too just to really rub in how stupid that decision was. Foreigners need to keep their opinions and million dollar prizes out of our elections. Snowden, however, should get one. Well, except that he probably worsened foreign relationships and might actually cause a war. But just on merit, why not?

Giving him the prize would also 'save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute that incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama' the prize, according to professor Stefan Svallfors

Save the Nobel Peace Prize from disrepute? Too little too late dumbass. To the Stefan Svallfors of the world, where the hell were you when the Nobel Prize was given to Arafat and Rabin, when it was given to Al Gore over Irena Sendler, or when it was never given to Gandhi?

Svallfor's motion has nothing to do with reputation or morality. It's about political posturing. I'm sure and certain that there are people other than Snowden more deserving of an actual peace price that actually matters. I mean, Snowden was more than willing to go on asylum in Venezuela or Cuba, hardly bastions of democracy and decency. People deserving of a true peace price (Gandhi for instance) would never had contemplated such a cognitive dissonant option, regardless of consequences.

[...] Snowden was more than willing to go on asylum in Venezuela or Cuba, hardly bastions of democracy and decency.

Edward Snowden's inability to find refuge from our gangster administration in any "friendly" democracy highlights the sacrifice he made — granting us an opportunity to reclaim our liberty in exchange for his own. We also get to witness the arrogance and hypocrisy with which our foreign relations are conducted — the Kafkaesque Bolivian flight kerfuffle demonstrated this to a degree well into the absurd.

Just want to point out that most of the comments here are comparing this to Obama's award. Snowden has been NOMINATED but not awarded. It turns out a fairly large number of people have the ability to nominate recipients: http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/index.html [nobelprize.org]

This really isn't news. It's more comment trolling by slashdot -- and they've been doing a very good job of it lately.

Forget about the consistution; it doesn't contain an infallible or eternal truth.Do you think this type of spying is right? If you think it should be forbidden and the law doesn't agree; change the law.Laws reflect the moral code of it's subjects. Do laws that allow these activities still reflect yours?

You couldn't be more wrong. Snowden exposed the unconstitutional (illegal) surveillance by the NSA. IT IS ILLEGAL. The people at the NSA should go to jail and be tried for treason for going against the constitution, and you should go to school to learn these things.

I have bad news for you about that "treason" term you throw around so casually. If you read the _whole_ Constitution instead of just the fashionable parts, you'll find that treason has a very specific definition in Article 3, Section 3 [usconstitution.net]. While I agree that the NSA programs are illegal, "the people" {{which ones?}} at NSA didn't meet the definition of treason. Not even close.

This man not only revealed a not-technically illegal surveillance program

Because the mark of a good representative democracy is secret action in alleged-but-unproven adherence to a set of classified interpretations, produced in a one-sided(in FISA court, the state makes its case, nobody takes the role of opposing counsel, and then the judges approve, of what, exactly, we don't know) proceeding, of what the law allows?

Not really. It's meant to be a prize for making the world more peaceful. Giving it to Obama was nuts, and it's now not clear if this prize has any point any more.

No. Giving it to Obama was controversial. Giving it to Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, and not giving it to Gandhi, now that was, is and will ever be nuts. Another nuts (read stupid) decision? Giving it to Al Gore while completely ignoring Holocaust savior and survivor Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 Jewish children during WII (acts for which she was detained, tortured, sentenced to death but miraculously survived.)

The Nobel Peace price not about peace. It's about political posturing.

You may want to stop drinking the Ghandi koolaid brought to you by Western Civilisation. From what I can tell (which is probably very biased as well), Ghandi isn't seen in some parts of India (Tamil Nadu, in my experience) as the great saviour of the nation as he is hailed by the media in the rest of the world.

He was someone who looked down on a number of castes, was an incredible imperialist, and hence very loyal to the British Empire. He didn't fight apartheid in South Africa because he believed the Whites were wrong, he fought it because he believed "clean Indians" were above "uncivilized races".

"A man's faults are those of his generation, his geniuses his own." --Goethe.

If you are waiting for a perfect man to give the prize to, you will never find one. Gandhi, for all his faults, still implemented the ideas of peaceful protests in ways that were later followed by the civil rights protests. He put his life on the line to defend the principles of peace, which is more than I've ever done. It's easy to sit here and criticize from the comfortable view of perspective, but if you were in Gandhi's time, living where he grew up, would you have any of his good traits?

Great men, like Thomas Jefferson, are rarely great because they are flawless. Jefferson owned slaves, was a coward, slept with his slave, was sometimes clueless; yet given all his weaknesses, look what he accomplished! It is inspiring that men with such weaknesses can accomplish so much, because surely we are all full of weaknesses. But we don't have to be limited by them, it is up to us.

And the other world powers that have multicultural prime ministers and presidents are... ? I feel like Obama's Peace Prize was more about transcending race and color finally among the world's super powers. France is super liberal but you'll never seen someone of Algerian descent as their prime minister.

And maybe that proves the point that the color of the your skin really shouldn't matter at all, either when discriminating or when promoting "multiculturalism"? I mean, Obama is just more of the same. They gave him the Nobel Peace Prize because they bought into the whole "hope and change" bandwagon, but then he turned out to be third and fourth terms of Bush.

And the other world powers that have multicultural prime ministers and presidents are... ? I feel like Obama's Peace Prize was more about transcending race and color finally among the world's super powers. France is super liberal but you'll never seen someone of Algerian descent as their prime minister.

The major cause of war/unrest in the world isn't skin color, it's religion. I'd be more interested in seeing an openly Atheist president than a black one but I'm not holding my breath on that happening in the USA anytime soon.

The Black Book of Communism is one of those rare books that really matters. It is the first systematic and comparative analysis of the "crimes, terror and repression" that accompanied Communism everywhere and that seemed to define its "genetic code." The book's centerpiece is a relentlessly documented narrative of political violence and repression in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, drawing on extensive archival materials made available to researchers since the collapse of Communist rule in 1991. But The Black Book also contains absorbing accounts of Communist repression in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World.

The fact of the matter is that atheist killer regimes need to base their killing in reason. Of course even atheists can be assholes and say 'kill em all because they are enemies', but they cannot resort to 'they must die because it is the will of [deity] and we must obey if we want to go to [good afterlife]'.

Notice how even your Wikipedia-link says this: "it led a concerted effort telling Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were "wrong" and "harmful", and that "good" citizens ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview" (my emphasis)

Religion can make a plethora of irrational 'reasons' for wishing other people dead perfectly valid to its followers. It also has pretty effective fear-mongering strategies: eternal burning and suffering sounds pretty uncomfortable. If you can avoid that by torching a few heretics, why even think twice?Atheists can only make you fear things that could actually exist and even then, they have to work to make you believe that those things have a non-negligible chance of happening.

I don't think you understand what that word means, yet like so many religious people, try to spread it around to every context to poison any argument.

Also, of course there are a lot of militant atheists out there. The same way there are/were a lot of militant "black people" out there. Guess what? When people trod all over you, threaten you, treat you like second class citizens, and impose their will (via legislation and political power) on you -- you're probably going to be a tad mother fucking militant.

When you persecute people and infringe upon them, it is necessary for their own good and their own existence to push back. Do you think gay people like spending so much of their life fighting for gay rights and equal treatment under the Constitution and the safety of not being beat to death on the street for simply being gay? Or do you think they would rather just have the equality and the safety of every other human being and carry on with the rest of their life?

Those "uppity gays" and "uppity negroes" and "militant atheists" that religious people usually say "should just shut the fuck up if they don't believe, because then it doesn't concern them" are "uppity" and "militant" precisely because they have to be active in fighting against the way they are treated, dismissed, and impacted by those who are intolerant.

Of course, not everyone can afford the time or personal/professional risk of being militant. Thankfully, there are those that make it their life-long cause to do that for the rest of them.

It is also hypocritical to call people "militant" who are just standing up for their rights and pushing back against your imposition upon society. I would say the "militant" ones are those who are using law and mob-rule to impose their religion upon politics, government, education, law, and all of society. Making comments about people being "animals" based on the tone of their skin or suggesting we should murder them so they "can meet their maker and find out how wrong they are about religion". THAT is militant.

It's a rather perverse and sick tactic to push and bully someone pretty much forever and then, when they stand up for themselves, shout "he's being intolerant of me!" (or, in some cases, trying to discredit lack of belief by claiming it is as much a religion as belief -- when it is the non-existence of belief and nothing more).

I imagine there were a lot of dudes, like yourself, back in the 1960s talking about how "all them negroes are actin' like nutjobs with all that marchin' and militant sitting in the front of the bus and drinking from white fountains and shit". (I am not trying to implicate you as a racist or anything, but am just drawing parallels between the attitude and terms exhibited by those in multiple situations to dismiss, diminish, and denigrate other segments of society who are actively demanding fair treatment).

Oh please, you just sound like a retard who knows nothing outside of the US when making statements like that. And the focus on "race" is also a typical US thing. What about a female president or a gay one or even an atheist one?

Belgium has a gay prime minister who is the son of two Italian immigrants.Germany has a female chancellor.Great Britain had a female prime minister decades ago.I can't count the number of countries that have atheist prime ministers/presidents.

There a dozens of other examples if you care to search for them. None of which make those leaders eligible for a Nobel Peace prize.

Yeah but the US president deserves a nobel peace prize just because he's black? What an achievement!

"Black prisoners make up 15% of the prisoner population and this compares with 2.2% of the general population – there is greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than there is in the United States."

Given that the US has the largest military in the world, has been involved in every major conflict of the last 50 years, and instigated a couple of them, it sounds like a pretty decent heuristic to me.

Defence spending is the normal measure because troop numbers doesn't determine military strength.

China for example has a massive standing army but it doesn't have the logistical infrastructure to take them anywhere of interest (i.e. it has a relatively small navy right now that could do little to defend itself against the US) and this is entirely an issue of defence spending. Defence expenditure is the greater measure of military effectiveness and hence why it's the key measure of military size and strength

Defense spending is one measure, there are plenty of others that matter. Number of troops, number of divisions, number of aircraft, number of missiles. The readiness of those units and equipment. The technology levels. They all play a part in assessing the strength of a nation's military.

China has been significantly increasing their military spending, and the size of their navy. They have a plan to build a number of aircraft carriers. The Chinese fleet has been taking part in anti-piracy patrols aroun

"2001 – On April 1, 2001, a mid-air collision between a United States Navy EP-3E ARIES II signals surveillance aircraft and a People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) J-8II interceptor fighter jet resulted in an international dispute between the United States and the People's Republic of China called the Hainan Island incident."

How is nominating for a peace prize to Edward Snowden interpreted as hatred to America?

Why can't it be equal to saying that 'we're against unauthorized intrusive spying on you're own citizens'?
Why do people need to degenerate this into hate mongering against an entire country rather than what it is. A critic of a part or it's government going rogue?

Fact is Snowden sacrificed himself so that people would know about (what he considered) unconstitutional searches and universal violations of universal human rights [un.org]- right?

"Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.

Maybe the PATRIOT ACT has made you think these kinds of writings are particularly unamerican? Or you could just accept the fact that Snowden's acts are just as american as were the actions of founding fathers of the United States; who were also temporarily considered traitors.

Also consider that now Snowden has higher approval rating than...
US Congress [reason.com] and Barack Obama [jpupdates.com]

...and I'm sure, all over the world, Edward Snowden has a higher approval rating than NSA.

Now, how were you supposed "to institute a new Government"? Oh you can't. And if you'd even become interested about it the government would know about it; thanks to PRISM.

"whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The only people who hate America, are those who would destroy the values outlined in the Bill of Rights. People like Snowden who act to protect the Bill of Rights, are patriots and heros. People who support the US no matter what it does, wrong or right, are mere amoral sociopathic nationalists.

Everyone knows what the NSA is about, but Snowden takes the operational details of the programs and gives them the Russians and Chinese.

Who is this 'everyone'? Because it sure didn't include me. I had no idea the NSA was trolling the whole internet or had cooperation from major IT giants. I didn't know they were spying on their own allies and friends. I didn't know GCHQ was collecting every scrap of traffic they could get their paws on and searching it for god knows what. I don't believe they are looking for terrorists because terrorists don't fight some technological war, they use disposable calling cards, disposable mobiles, cash, and imp

I had no idea the NSA was trolling the whole internet or had cooperation from major IT giants. I didn't know they were spying on their own allies and friends.

Well, for me at least, the push to get people's data onto the internet and off of their own hard drives was a red flag to me. Even if it wasn't the NSA/CIA/FBI/DHS specifically, there seemed an oddly timed shift, cohesive shift to "the cloud", in order to solve problems that, in many cases, had been solved for some time. Personally, I suspected corporate profits and data mining for marketing data with the side bonus of Uncle Sam making the occasional offer Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook couldn't ref

Allow me to dissect your argument and prove why it is entirely irrelevant.

I understand that many might not approve of spying and the NSA, but Snowden was a professional working for them via the contractor Booz Allen.

Who else would know the facts of the program? Who else could provide this information? It had to be somebody "inside". Had these accusations come from some guy on the street they would have been ignored as yet another crackpot conspiracy theory. Whistle-blowing on illegal activities always comes from a man on the inside.

Everyone knows what the NSA is about,

There were long suspicions of "what the NSA is about" but no proof, and the rule of law is that proof is necessary to convict. Prior to Snowden's release, any accusations of mass surveillance of US citizens leveled at the NSA were scoffingly disregarded and without evidence it was impossible to proceed. Thanks to Snowden, these accusations can no longer ignore the accusations (they may ignore the orders to stop, sadly).

but Snowden takes the operational details of the programs and gives them the Russians and Chinese.

Snowden released the details of the illegal and un-Constitutional programs to the/press/. You make it sound as if he snuck up to the Russian ambassador and passed secrets on to only them, which is hardly the case. Yes, the Russians now are aware of the program (most likely, the ones in power who actually worried about such things probably had a good idea of the capability of those programs already anyway, but that's beside the point). But more importantly, the US citizenry know about it as well. Ultimately, they are the only ones who can legally force a change. That other nations may now know of these programs is a side effect and - idealistically - irrelevant anyway. After all, illegal programs should be stopped so any intelligence gained about them becomes useless.

Snowden may be a "traitor" to the/people/ in the NSA, but our loyalty should not lie towards individuals but to the law and ideals that define our nation. Snowden obeyed those principles while other agents turned a blind eye or actively pursued these unconstitutional activities. He's far more a patriot than they.